Hacker News Reader

Comment by proxyon | Hacker News Reader

It's not entitled to say we own our own computers and don't want your political advertising on them.

The reality is that while you own your computer, you generally don't own the proprietary software on it, you _license_ it. That license entitles you to remarkably little beyond using the software as the software vendor permits.

I don't think FOSS protects you from political activism.

Here's what comes up on my (Fedora, obviously) machine when I run VIM with no filename specified:

                  VIM - Vi IMproved                                
                                                                   
                   version 8.2.5052                                
               by Bram Moolenaar et al.                            
          Modified by <bugzilla@redhat.com>                        
     Vim is open source and freely distributable                   
                                                                   
            Help poor children in Uganda!                          
    type  :help iccf<Enter>       for information                  
                                                                   
    type  :q<Enter>               to exit                          
    type  :help<Enter>  or  <F1>  for on-line help                 
    type  :help version8<Enter>   for version info

According to their git history, VIM has carried uganda.txt since at least 2004.

No technical measures exist to stop you from removing this call for donations, but it's more work to patch it out then it is to just ignore it. This makes FOSS software a pretty good vehicle for political activism. Not just the fact that organizing a hostile fork to remove a message like this one is too much trouble and makes you look like a jerk, but also because political activism is a good way to motivate people to write and release software for free in the first place, making up for how difficult it is to really monetize FOSS software.

> No technical measures exist to stop you from removing this call for donations, but it's more work to patch it out then it is to just ignore it. This makes FOSS software a pretty good vehicle for political activism.

This doesn't bother me too much and I don't even seem to notice it consciously, but I am really glad that every utility doesn't have an unrelated charity pitch (or other advertisement) built into it. Though I think a number of GNU programs do contain free software advocacy messages/advertisements, those don't bother me too much either.

What really irritated me though was the nagware message in GNU parallel soliciting bogus citations (or money, which may be less ethically problematic but is still annoying.) I didn't hate it enough to fork the code and remove the nag message myself (or fight for it as a patch to the Debian packages or something) but I quit using GNU parallel because it left a bad taste. I imagine a nightmare Linux shareware edition distro where every program (and library, driver, kernel module, etc.) prints out a nagware message that you have to turn off.

Most people won't even read that and if you open a file instead of just typing vim you won't even see the message. Changing an icon is quite a bit different since you have to click the icon to open the app. As far as I know Vim hasn't changed the gVim icon to Uganda's colors.

  set shm+=I

Reply on news.ycombinator.com